Friday, March 08, 2013

Will new plans for a digital rural India hit or miss?

Since the internet
was introduced in 1995 in India’s major cities of Delhi, Mumbai,
Chennai and Kolkatta, it has steadly grown in urban areas. By 1998,
India has its first Internet Service Provider, Sify (later sold for $155
million). By 2001, India has its first crime branch. By 2005, the
country had over 200,000 internet cafes. Facebook arrived in 2006, and
in 2009, the government drafted policy on Indian language internet
domain names.

As individuals in cities stock up on phones, laptops and tablets,
accessing free wifi at more and more public places, the question of
digital access in rural India still remains. Over the last decade, The
National e-Governance Plan sought to bridge this gap by establishing a Common Service Center in
each village. A CSC, as it is known, is a public-private partnership
and operates as a one-stop hub for online government services
(e-delivery) such as payment of certain utility bills, birth and death
certificates, university exam results and such.

However, the overall experiment has revealed that the CSCs do not
function equally. People do not need to use these government facilities
more than once a month (if that), so unless the private entrepreneur is
savvy enough to generate other income from the hub, it is not profitable
to run. As well as this, irregular electricity supplies often restrict
the timings of the CSC. And finally, while a public office with
computers serves some purpose, it cannot substitute having personal
connections in people’s homes.

This is why the government of India proposed a National Broadband Network,
which will essentially lay out a fibre-optic cable across the country
to achieve last mile connectivity. The idea behind this is simply that
the network, like roads, will be provided by the government to then
encourage private operations to start services those previously
untouched areas. The government has committed about $4 billion to build
the network that is projected to connect 250,000 village headquarters.
One can only hope that it does not become mired in allegations of
corruption, like so many other government projects in India.

To understand India, you first need to look at some numbers. As of September 2012, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
revealed that in a country of 1.24 billion people, there are a total of
937.70 million telecom subscribers, including both wireless and
wireline. Of these, 595.69 million or 63.5 per cent are from urban
areas, while the rest, 342.01 million or 36.47 per cent are from the
rural areas. The overall teledensity
of the country is 77.04 per cent, with urban pockets at a whopping
161.13 per cent compared to 40.36 per cent in rural areas. Finally, the
total number of internet subscribers in India (excluding those who use
it on their mobile phones) is 24.01 million, a 5.97 per cent jump from
the previous quarter. Some studies put mobile 3G subscriptions at 30
million, as of late 2011.

The figures reveal two important details. The first is that while
there are many subscribers for telecom, that does not translate to each
citizen owning a phone. In fact, the discrepancy between urban and rural
teledensity, compounded by the very low broadband penetration in the
country all point to the woefully inadequate job by both government and
markets to connect much of rural India.
The solution to digital constraints in rural India
has been one of hits and misses in the recent past. In terms of policy,
India’s objectives have remained to some degree, quite ambitious. The
2012 Telecom Policy aims to take rural teledensity to 60 per cent by
2017 and one hundred per cent by 2020. The methods, however, are being
changed as we speak.

In 2002, the government had constituted a Universal Service
Obligation Fund, with the overall intention of encouraging private
telecom operators to service remote and less lucrative markets. It did
not work, as many service operations opted to pay a penalty instead of
rolling out service in commercially unviable regions. For example,
villages in India can often have only 500 residents, or be so poor that
companies cannot even be guaranteed a minimum number of subscribers to
justify their spending on infrastructure. At the same time, the high
volume of mobile phones and internet subscriptions in the urban areas
suggest that the market has successfully serviced cities, but is not
incentivised enough to reach the deepest pockets of India.

While the government
will be watched closely to see if it can deliver the network
infrastructure it has promised to rural India on time, another facet of
an inclusive digital development needs to be kept in mind. Right now,
the internet in India serves populations who can read and write in some
of the dominant languages including English, Hindi and
some prominent state languages. However, as homes in smaller corners of
the country get connected, everything from keyboards to content will
have to cater to local dialects.

At the same time, outside of big e-commerce portals, projects that
serve the smallest customer will be the only way the internet becomes
relevant and constructive to rural India. Else, it will solely become a
vehicle to youtube videos, Bollywood and cricket updates and let’s face
it, porn.

When the final tabulation is done, it seems the government of India
has understood all too well that leaving last mile of internet
connectivity to commercial companies is not a viable strategy. Another
reason they are taking up the challenge with a degree of renewed vigor
is that they have pinned high hopes on their ability to deliver
government services and crucial information in a more efficient manner
through the net. To that end, the information highway needs to be
established, so that the distance between the digital haves and digital have-nots does not increase any further.

The recent $1 million TED prize-winning education researcher Dr Sugata Mitra’s ground-breaking project, Hole in the Wall,
demonstrates that all that is really needed to spur learning is access
to information. In this case, Dr Mishra left an internet connected PC in
a hole in a wall, and left to their own devices, slum children quickly
learned how to use the computer and go online. Imagine the possibilities
if they can grow up as digital natives.

2 comments:

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Evidently, India’s digital divide is far from bridged yet, and maybe unlikely to be for a long time. In any case, the country’s 940 m phone-subscriber base is illusory: the statistic counts multiple (and inactive) numbers assigned to the same person/handset, a legacy of the era when extra spectrum allotments were based on pvt company claims on subscriber additions. An Idea Cellular salesman once admitted to me that the idea of offering you a new plan every now and then was to log you as a new subscriber with a new number that converges calls to your old number/s. So if you have changed a few ‘plans’ for better deals, you may not even know that you have five or six numbers recorded in the company’s database, all routed to your original number. Little wonder that India has such a wonderful tele-density, while half this country is too poor to afford any of this. It is one big lie. This is what ‘India Shining’ was all about: a lot of bullshit dressed up as mass development. Ask Gujarat: that state is an expert bullshit packager.

Of course, the internet subscriber count of 24 m sounds real. It is pathetic for a country whose self-deceiving elite thinks it is advancing into the electronic age.

Last point. Porn is not the awful truth we must face in all this. One half of the real awful truth, to my mind, is the fact that India’s Haves appear to have fooled themselves into believing that Have-nots are no longer all that badly off, and that economic growth is enough to solve all our problems. The other half is that the ugliest kind of discrimination persists along lines of caste and creed, and efforts to overcome such social ills are so weak and half-hearted that the country may end up riven by the world’s worst civil conflict in the history of mankind.

Believe me, ugly loveless sex over the internet would be a lot easier to stomach than ugly merciless violence.